Cheney book reveals internal battles

In his upcoming memoir, former Vice President Dick Cheney reveals internal battles within the Bush administration and criticizes onetime colleagues George Tenet, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — even while praising President George W. Bush as “an outstanding leader.”

Cheney pulls no punches in the memoir, “In My Time, which will be released Tuesday. According to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the book, Cheney accuses former Secretary of State Rice of being naive for trying to negotiate a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea.

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The “concessions delivered” to North Korea “in the naive hope that despots would respond in kind” were wrong, wrote Cheney, as was the advice given by Rice’s State Department on the issue, which the vice president wrote was “utterly misleading.”

Rice was also off base for clashing with White House advisers over the tone of the president’s speeches on Iraq, Cheney wrote.

The vice president is highly critical of those who stood in the way of his vision on the Iraq War, which he still asserts was the right decision. He attacks former Secretary of State Powell for trying to undermine Bush. Cheney wrote that Powell expressed doubts about the Iraq War to those outside of government, which the Vice President saw as improper.

After the 2004 election, Cheney noted, he sought to have Powell removed from the Cabinet. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney wrote. His resignation, Cheney added, “was for the best.”

According to the Drudge Report, Cheney also blasts Powell for standing silently by as his deputy, Richard Armitage, leaked CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity to the press — something that eventually would engulf the vice president’s office and result in the conviction of his chief of staff, Scooter Libby.

Cheney also reserved harsh words for Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Tenet resigned in 2004 “when the going got tough,” Cheney wrote, according to the New York Times, something that was “unfair to the president.”

And although Cheney praises Bush as “charge, strong and resolute,” he also details times when they butted heads. Cheney writes of an incident in which he urged Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear site in June 2007. Not a single administration official in the room agreed with him.

“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about the incident. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”